Joseph Zieler trial: Victims’ neighbor recalls shocking killings in 1990

On Tuesday, jury selection continued in the trial of Joseph Zieler, accused of murdering and sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl and her babysitter in 1990. The trial brings back vivid memories for a neighbor of the victims.

Decades after the gruesome deaths of little Robin Cornell and 32-year-old Lisa Story in Cape Coral, DNA evidence linked Zieler to the crimes. Now, the accused killer’s defense team is working to keep him off death row.

Elaine Belling remembers May 1990, when the headlines were all over TV and in the newspapers: “Cape woman, girl slain.”

“It was the talk of the city, and it was pretty small back then,” Belling said. “Everyone was talking about it. And so I got on the computer and started reading every word written about it.”

That’s when Belling realized the victims were her neighbors. Neighbors she never met.

“It just seemed so unlike anything I had ever heard about Cape Coral,” Belling said. “It really hit me that… how heinous it was, a little 11-year-old girl.”

Wednesday marks 33 years since the murder of Robin and Story in the Cornells’ Cape Coral home. Robin’s mother Jan found the bodies.

For 26 years, Belling says, “There were no leads; you know, that the case went so cold.”

But the headlines didn’t stop: “Mother still hopes to catch killer.”

“I always thought someday, somehow, somebody’s going to find a clue,” Belling said.

In 2016, detectives Todd Everly and Charles Garrett told WINK News they had found their man,
Joseph Zieler, through a DNA match.

“I said there was something missing from my career: the solving of this case,” one of the detectives said.

“I feel in my heart that there is a God because I prayed for this day every day for 26 years,” Jan Cornell said the same year.

“I was on the phone with a lot of my friends saying that they caught this guy,” Belling said. “They’ve caught him. And it just seemed like such an absolute miracle. And the mother of the little girl was on TV. And I had seen her interviewed before. And it just, it just hit me so hard.”

Seven years later, Belling is ready to watch every day of Zieler’s trial.

“Lots and lots of people who have lived here for many years are with, you know, with Mrs. Cornell,” Belling said.